Answer me this, AC, without caveats or qualifications: which is more important, a woman's convenience or a human life?
Yes or no: If you believe in the sanctity of human life no matter how that life was conceived, should the state force a woman to birth a child conceived through rape/incest?
The First Amendment protects your rights to speak freely and associate with whomever you want. It doesn’t give you the right to make others listen. It doesn’t give you the right to make others give you access to an audience. And it doesn’t give you the right to make a personal soapbox out of private property you don’t own. Nobody is entitled to a platform or an audience at the expense of someone else.
That’s my whole point about the ethics of the situation. Morally, I have no opposition to Facebook kicking off people who are merely charged with participating in the insurrection. (Again: Fuck the insurrectionists.) Ethically, I have some misgivings about booting people who are merely charged with a crime—“innocent until proven guilty” and all that. What happens if one of the alleged rioters who got banned is acquited and Facebook can no longer justify the ban based only on that person being charged with a crime?
Morally, I’m 100% okay with Facebook’s decision; ethically, not so much.
Your other bullshit aside, I have another question for you: Do you believe the government should make you host speech you don’t want to host on an interactive web service you own and operate? For example: If you don’t want to host Ku Klux Klan propaganda—or Black Lives Matter propaganda, for that matter—on a Mastodon instance you run, do you really believe the government should make you host it “or else”?
There is no legal requirement for an efficacy study.
Shouldn’t the FDA have done one before, y’know, potentially killing people as part of a “test run” of whether a given drug could actually treat COVID-19?
Civil rights law doesn't just protect marginalized peoples. It[’]s a neutral law. It protects all peoples.
Yes, I’m well aware of that. But you said (and I quote):
While the Civil Rights acts are racially neutral their passage was clearly out of bias and intended to specifically protect black people.
Again: I simply can’t imagine why a law passed to protect the civil rights of a given group of people might be somehow biased in favor of that group of people, even if the language of the law is itself neutral~. It’s almost as if the majority group doesn’t necessarily need those protections on a regular basis because they’re not being marginalized on a regular basis~. Imagine that~.
Yes I do. What are you going to do about it besides whine like a dog?
You are on a thread praising a judge for issuing a preliminary injection where he based on Turner Broad. Sys., Inc. v. FCC 1994. Turner Broad. Sys., Inc. v. FCC 1994 is case involving a cable TV provider.
And? A judge referencing a case that involves a cable TV provider doesn’t turn an interactive web service into a cable TV provider. My god, how are you that ignorant?
I will ask you again: For what reason should any and all interactive web services be forced by law to host all legally protected speech, regardless of whether the people who own and operate the service want to host that speech? Please note that I said “interactive web service”, not “cable TV provider”, and that “legally protected speech” includes racial slurs, anti-queer propaganda, and any speech you might find offensive (e.g., “Black Lives Matter”).
The FCC is broad regulatory power of all wired and wireless communication under the communications act.
Then show me the exact law, statute, or “common law” court ruling that says, in clear and concise terms that are directly on point to this argument, the FCC absolutely has the power to make any interactive web service—from the mighty Facebook to the smallest Mastodon instance—host any and all legally protected speech.
No, he didn’t. If that were even remotely true, we wouldn’t even be talking about regulations for speech on social media because the government would already be able to make social media companies host all speech.
A forum being made available to the public does not make it a public forum. A forum taking over the mantle of the “public forum” in terms of being where lots of people gather to discuss ideas, events, and people doesn’t make that forum a public forum, either. A true public forum is one owned by the people/the government.
Hell, let’s go back to some of the most pertinent parts of Kavanaugh’s opinion in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck:
Under the Court’s cases, a private entity may qualify as a state actor when it exercises “powers traditionally exclusively reserved to the State.” … It is not enough that the federal, state, or local government exercised the function in the past, or still does. And it is not enough that the function serves the public good or the public interest in some way. Rather, to qualify as a traditional, exclusive public function within the meaning of our state-action precedents, the government must have traditionally and exclusively performed the function.
Here, Kavanaugh is saying that even if the government has performed a specific function, a private entity only qualifies as a state actor if it performs a function the government has exclusively performed in the past. Applying that logic to Facebook means Facebook can’t be a state actor because the government has never exclusively performed the function of “public fora” in the colloquial, “people gather here to discuss things” meaning of the phrase.
By contrast, when a private entity provides a forum for speech, the private entity is not ordinarily constrained by the First Amendment because the private entity is not a state actor. The private entity may thus exercise editorial discretion over the speech and speakers in the forum. This Court so ruled in its 1976 decision in Hudgens v. NLRB. There, the Court held that a shopping center owner is not a state actor subject to First Amendment requirements such as the public forum doctrine[.]
The Hudgens decision reflects a commonsense principle: Providing some kind of forum for speech is not an activity that only governmental entities have traditionally performed. Therefore, a private entity who provides a forum for speech is not transformed by that fact alone into a state actor. After all, private property owners and private lessees often open their property for speech. Grocery stores put up community bulletin boards. Comedy clubs host open mic nights. As Judge Jacobs persuasively explained, it “is not at all a near-exclusive function of the state to provide the forums for public expression, politics, information, or entertainment[”.]
tl;dr: “Someone who opens a place for people to speak their mind isn’t a state actor only because they’ve opened a place for people to speak their mind.”
If the rule were otherwise, all private property owners and private lessees who open their property for speech would be subject to First Amendment constraints and would lose the ability to exercise what they deem to be appropriate editorial discretion within that open forum. Private property owners and private lessees would face the unappetizing choice of allowing all comers or closing the platform altogether.
Even though Kavanaugh isn’t technically referring to services like Facebook and Twitter, the logic of this argument can easily apply to those services. Hell, the last sentence in that quoted block of text refers to the consequences people like me have said would happen to services if 230 were to be repealed/“reformed”.
The Constitution does not disable private property owners and private lessees from exercising editorial discretion over speech and speakers on their property. …
A private entity … who opens its property for speech by others is not transformed by that fact alone into a state actor.
And therein lies the conclusion of the argument: Being a “public forum” in the colloquial sense doesn’t turn a platform into a public forum in the legal sense.
You can misspell “strict” and mock Judge Hinkle all you want, child. Any court that overturns his decision is a court that is willing to overturn decades of jurisprudence in re: First Amendment caselaw and property rights for the sake of appeasing the hurt feelings of conservatives who are upset that their “views” (oh, you know the ones…) are being “censored” off sites they don’t seem to like all that much in the first place. Is that really the kind of court you think is good for this country?
My guess is I don’t give a shit. Even the poor can go to bat for wealthy assholes because they’ve been brainwashed to believe in the idea that “rich means good” and “if we tax the rich that’s socialism” even though all the tax breaks and loopholes are socialism for the rich—as would be a flat tax rate that keeps them from paying a lot more in terms of percentages than the poorest Americans. What’s so wrong about making a billionaire give 50% of his annual income to the public treasury if that means giving up $50 million of an annual $100 million take? I mean, is the billionaire really going to be worse off for not having that extra $50 million?
Again: You keep focusing so much on the “fairness” of the percentage that you’re ignoring the humanities of the situation—that you’re ignoring, time and time again, the idea of the law of diminishing utility. All your arguments go back to the percentage of the amount paid in taxes as if a poor person and a rich person both paying 10% of their income is “fair” because it’s “the same”. Mathematically, yes, it is the same percentage—but it isn’t the same in terms of utility to the person being taxed. You know that, you all but admit that, and yet you don’t seem to give a shit.
I can’t be fucked to care about how much money you make if you can’t be fucked to address the law of diminishing utility without going back to “tHe PeRcEnTaGeS aRe EqUaL”.
Why should we ever rely on the whims of what a rich person chooses to support with a mere fraction of their money when the government could tax the fuck out of the rich and better distribute the money where it’s needed the most? Or, to put it more bluntly: Why should their scattershot charity replace focused public funding?
Nor is wealth obscene
At a certain level, wealth not only loses its utility, it becomes an obscenity. It proves that the person hoarding such wealth has exploited God knows how many other people—typically the working class, and especially the poor—to become so wealthy that to consider how much richer they are than the average American is like considering the size of the universe in comparison to the size of Earth.
That’s why I say “being a billionaire is unethical”: No one can exploit that many people for that long a stretch of time and not come out the other side of that particular shit tunnel smelling like a rose. To flaunt that wealth by hoarding it, doling it out in small fractions, and continuing to passively build it by doing nothing is fucking disgusting and the fact that you care more about “doing right by the rich” shows how much you value the approval of people who’d sooner step on your neck, choke you to death, and still make you pay them for the privilege of having been killed by your “betters”.
you come across not as progressive or socialist, but communist
I don’t believe the government should own or control the means of production. But I do believe they should tax the everloving fuck out of the wealthy people who do.
A flat income tax with a scaled corporate tax is far more fair to everyone.
No, it isn’t.
Let’s assume that you get your plan and that instead of taxing the poor, you waive all their taxes and start taxing people who make…let’s say, $50,000 a year. Right off the bat you’re being unfair because you’re giving people beneath a specific income bracket an “out” from having to be taxed—a fact about which I’m sure those who are barely on the other side of that bracket would complain. But that’s not worth exploring right now.
Now assume that the flat tax is 10% of all income, regardless of how much anyone makes (aside from the people beneath the tax line). That means someone making $50,000 gives up $5,000 every year; for someone making $50,000, $5,000 is a significant amount of money. As the income level goes up, the amount does as well—but the utility of that taxed amount lowers. Someone who makes $500,000 a year, for example, will feel the loss of $50,000 a year, but they can still live with few worries about paying the bills. Someone who makes $5 million might miss their $500k in taxes, but they’re not going to be sweating it that much, considering they can still live well on $4.5 million. Someone who makes $50 million a year would lose $5 million, and I can all but guarantee that unless they’re spending their money on hookers and blow all day every day, they’re not going to care all that much about losing that much in taxes.
At some point, the law of diminishing utility kicks in and people who get taxed a small amount of their income won’t miss it because they’ve got so much of their income left that they can still live well. The poor don’t get to experience that feeling because while they may pay the same percentage that the rich do, they’re paying more money than they can typically afford to give up because they need that money in a far more utilitarian way.
You’re so concerned with “fairness” in terms of percentages that you look past how much people who can’t hoard wealth need the money you think they should pay so rich people don’t have to pay nearly as much out of “fairness” to the rich. That’s the fatal flaw of the flat tax idea, and it’s a flaw you’ve refused to consider in its entirety by the way you keep cherrypicking things I’ve said and quoted them out of their full context to keep saying shit that ignores the humanities of the situation and holy shit you really are a Republican.
What I am suggesting is that you’re so focused on the economics of a flat tax proposal that you’re not even bothering to look at the humanities. You’re not even trying to care that a flat tax would fuck over the poor and those close to the poverty line.
To paraphrase something I heard elsewhere (because I can’t be fucked to find the original right now): The average person is never as close to being rich as they are to being homeless. And to add onto that: Poverty and wealth both compound. But whereas wealth compounds into more wealth (the rich get richer), poverty compounds into even more poverty (the poor get poorer). A rich person who gets into a fender-bender can likely afford to pay for repairs and be back on the road the next day, if not sooner—and without suffering any major setbacks in their life. A poor person who gets into a fender-bender might not seek repairs because they need their car to get to work and public transportation in their area is virtually non-existent. The damage to the car comes back to bite that poor person in a couple of months when the car breaks down on their way to work; now they not only need to pay for the towing of their car, but they need to pay for either repairs or a new car, and that’s not even getting into whether they might miss time at work (thus driving their finances even further into a death spiral).
Taxing the poor person would only make things worse. The same goes for people who are living close to the poverty line. Under a flat tax program—deductibles be damned—they’d have to pay more into the public treasury than they should have to because “it’s fair”. Meanwhile, the rich person gets taxed the same amount and might not even notice because they don’t need that money in the same way a poor person does. Hell, tax a billionaire at a 10% rate, and chances are good that they’ll have made that amount back by the end of the year.
A flat tax punishes the poor and rewards the wealthy. It compounds poverty and wealth in (un)equal measure. The only reason you don’t seem to care is that you’re still so focused on the money—the property, if you will—that you’re looking past the humanity. But hey, that’s no surprise: Conservatives tend to look past the poor on the way to kissing wealthy ass.
I doubt you’d donate 900,000,000 of a surprise inheritance to be in the “average” holdings class.
The average American isn’t worth $100 million. And if a billionaire can’t live on $100 million dollars per year, that says more about their ridiculous behavior, their ego, and their incompetence with money than it does about anything else. Hell, give me $100 million and I could live comfortably for the rest of my life—with at least three-fourths of that amount still in my bank account by the time I kick the bucket.
There is no “more”, they would pay the same.
I didn’t say they’d pay “more money” full stop; I said they’d pay “more of the money they need to survive”. A poor person might pay a few hundred bucks in taxes, but they might need that money down the line to pay a medical bill or a surprise car repair or some other unforeseen expense that could require more money than they have in the bank. A billionaire who pays $100 million in taxes will not need that money to live comfortably because they already have been and likely always will be.
The law of diminishing utility is a thing: As people make more money, the amount of comfort made possible by that money rises, until they reach a point where no amount of money can make them more comfortable than they already are. At that point, money becomes meaningless in all ways but as a status symbol. Billionaires do not need to be worth a billion dollars or more to live in comfort; at that point, money is but a symbol of their greed and their lust for power—a signifier that they’ve exploited the working class and the government alike to become arguably more powerful than the working class and the government combined.
Poverty isn’t a moral failing—obscene wealth is. That you think the right thing to do is tax the obscenely wealthy at the same rate you’d tax someone scraping by on the $8 an hour they earn in a warehouse owned by an obscenely wealthy asshole is…well, it’s telling everyone a lot about your priorities.
Then how is it a “flat tax” if everyone doesn’t have to pay it? Either everyone pays 10% or it’s going to be skewed—“unfair”, even—in one way or another.
And even assuming the bottom level on income doesn’t get taxed, what happens to people living just above the poverty line, who just barely qualify for the first level that does get taxed? What makes taking away 10% of their income “fair” even though, like the people in the income bracket beneath them, they may need a good chunk of that 10% for some emergency that they can’t foresee?
A progressive tax system makes more sense because we can afford to tax the rich at higher rates. They can afford to lose that much wealth and still have no worries about whether they’ll be able to buy a new car or go to the hospital without being bankrupted or pay for shelter for themselves and their families. Poor people have to make every last cent count, even if it means they go without something important for a few days—like, say, clean water or power or even food. Taxing the poor, even if they live right above the poverty line, places on them a burden that the rich can easily shoulder on their own.
Being a billionaire is immoral and unethical. (It should also be illegal, but that’s just me talking.) Taxing the poor is also immoral and unethical. Why should the government make people who are barely living above the poverty line pay more of the money they need to survive into the public treasury than rich people? Why should the poor and nearly-poor pay 10% of their income and continue to live in poverty while the rich pay the same percentage and continue to live in luxury they’ll never really have to worry about losing?
I’m well aware of the many ethical failures of Facebook. My ethical concerns here directly and specifically relate to moderation efforts; having been a moderator in the past, thinking about doing what Facebook did gives me pause to consider my own ethics in that regard.
Legally, it’s fine. Morally, it’s great. Ethically, it’s questionable at best. And on any given day, I might be for or against what Facebook did. That I don’t see an easy answer to the ethical question right now is…discomforting.
There still lies a significant question you need to answer vis-á-vis your flat tax proposal: Why should a poor person give up 10% of their income when they need that money in a far more acute, direct, “I need this to live in case of an emergency” way than a rich person will ever need 10% of their income? The poor can’t afford to pay into the public treasury in the same way as the rich—so why should they be punished for their poverty by having to give up more of the money they absolutely need to live? Aside from the purely mathematical fairness of “everyone pays the same rate”, what specific facet of a flat tax plan is fair to the poorest Americans?
On the post: It Can Always Get Dumber: Trump Sues Facebook, Twitter & YouTube, Claiming His Own Government Violated The Constitution
Christ, what a snowflake.
On the post: Facebook Is Banning Anyone Charged With Participating In Capitol Hill Insurrection
Yes or no: If you believe in the sanctity of human life no matter how that life was conceived, should the state force a woman to birth a child conceived through rape/incest?
On the post: Facebook Is Banning Anyone Charged With Participating In Capitol Hill Insurrection
Time for some tasty copypasta!
The First Amendment protects your rights to speak freely and associate with whomever you want. It doesn’t give you the right to make others listen. It doesn’t give you the right to make others give you access to an audience. And it doesn’t give you the right to make a personal soapbox out of private property you don’t own. Nobody is entitled to a platform or an audience at the expense of someone else.
On the post: Facebook Is Banning Anyone Charged With Participating In Capitol Hill Insurrection
That’s my whole point about the ethics of the situation. Morally, I have no opposition to Facebook kicking off people who are merely charged with participating in the insurrection. (Again: Fuck the insurrectionists.) Ethically, I have some misgivings about booting people who are merely charged with a crime—“innocent until proven guilty” and all that. What happens if one of the alleged rioters who got banned is acquited and Facebook can no longer justify the ban based only on that person being charged with a crime?
Morally, I’m 100% okay with Facebook’s decision; ethically, not so much.
On the post: Florida Steps Up To Defend Its Unconstitutional Social Media Law And It's Every Bit As Terrible As You'd Imagine
Your other bullshit aside, I have another question for you: Do you believe the government should make you host speech you don’t want to host on an interactive web service you own and operate? For example: If you don’t want to host Ku Klux Klan propaganda—or Black Lives Matter propaganda, for that matter—on a Mastodon instance you run, do you really believe the government should make you host it “or else”?
On the post: Florida Steps Up To Defend Its Unconstitutional Social Media Law And It's Every Bit As Terrible As You'd Imagine
Shouldn’t the FDA have done one before, y’know, potentially killing people as part of a “test run” of whether a given drug could actually treat COVID-19?
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
Yes, I’m well aware of that. But you said (and I quote):
Again: I simply can’t imagine why a law passed to protect the civil rights of a given group of people might be somehow biased in favor of that group of people, even if the language of the law is itself neutral~. It’s almost as if the majority group doesn’t necessarily need those protections on a regular basis because they’re not being marginalized on a regular basis~. Imagine that~.
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
Yes I do. What are you going to do about it besides whine like a dog?
And? A judge referencing a case that involves a cable TV provider doesn’t turn an interactive web service into a cable TV provider. My god, how are you that ignorant?
I will ask you again: For what reason should any and all interactive web services be forced by law to host all legally protected speech, regardless of whether the people who own and operate the service want to host that speech? Please note that I said “interactive web service”, not “cable TV provider”, and that “legally protected speech” includes racial slurs, anti-queer propaganda, and any speech you might find offensive (e.g., “Black Lives Matter”).
On the post: Florida Steps Up To Defend Its Unconstitutional Social Media Law And It's Every Bit As Terrible As You'd Imagine
Then show me the exact law, statute, or “common law” court ruling that says, in clear and concise terms that are directly on point to this argument, the FCC absolutely has the power to make any interactive web service—from the mighty Facebook to the smallest Mastodon instance—host any and all legally protected speech.
I’ll wait.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Then leave. You won’t be missed. 👋
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
No, he didn’t. If that were even remotely true, we wouldn’t even be talking about regulations for speech on social media because the government would already be able to make social media companies host all speech.
A forum being made available to the public does not make it a public forum. A forum taking over the mantle of the “public forum” in terms of being where lots of people gather to discuss ideas, events, and people doesn’t make that forum a public forum, either. A true public forum is one owned by the people/the government.
Hell, let’s go back to some of the most pertinent parts of Kavanaugh’s opinion in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck:
Here, Kavanaugh is saying that even if the government has performed a specific function, a private entity only qualifies as a state actor if it performs a function the government has exclusively performed in the past. Applying that logic to Facebook means Facebook can’t be a state actor because the government has never exclusively performed the function of “public fora” in the colloquial, “people gather here to discuss things” meaning of the phrase.
tl;dr: “Someone who opens a place for people to speak their mind isn’t a state actor only because they’ve opened a place for people to speak their mind.”
Even though Kavanaugh isn’t technically referring to services like Facebook and Twitter, the logic of this argument can easily apply to those services. Hell, the last sentence in that quoted block of text refers to the consequences people like me have said would happen to services if 230 were to be repealed/“reformed”.
And therein lies the conclusion of the argument: Being a “public forum” in the colloquial sense doesn’t turn a platform into a public forum in the legal sense.
You can misspell “strict” and mock Judge Hinkle all you want, child. Any court that overturns his decision is a court that is willing to overturn decades of jurisprudence in re: First Amendment caselaw and property rights for the sake of appeasing the hurt feelings of conservatives who are upset that their “views” (oh, you know the ones…) are being “censored” off sites they don’t seem to like all that much in the first place. Is that really the kind of court you think is good for this country?
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
My guess is I don’t give a shit. Even the poor can go to bat for wealthy assholes because they’ve been brainwashed to believe in the idea that “rich means good” and “if we tax the rich that’s socialism” even though all the tax breaks and loopholes are socialism for the rich—as would be a flat tax rate that keeps them from paying a lot more in terms of percentages than the poorest Americans. What’s so wrong about making a billionaire give 50% of his annual income to the public treasury if that means giving up $50 million of an annual $100 million take? I mean, is the billionaire really going to be worse off for not having that extra $50 million?
Again: You keep focusing so much on the “fairness” of the percentage that you’re ignoring the humanities of the situation—that you’re ignoring, time and time again, the idea of the law of diminishing utility. All your arguments go back to the percentage of the amount paid in taxes as if a poor person and a rich person both paying 10% of their income is “fair” because it’s “the same”. Mathematically, yes, it is the same percentage—but it isn’t the same in terms of utility to the person being taxed. You know that, you all but admit that, and yet you don’t seem to give a shit.
I can’t be fucked to care about how much money you make if you can’t be fucked to address the law of diminishing utility without going back to “tHe PeRcEnTaGeS aRe EqUaL”.
On the post: DRM Strikes Again: Ubisoft Makes Its Own Game Unplayable By Shutting Down DRM Server
To quote Jim Sterling:
Oh, Ubisoft!
🤮
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
Why should we ever rely on the whims of what a rich person chooses to support with a mere fraction of their money when the government could tax the fuck out of the rich and better distribute the money where it’s needed the most? Or, to put it more bluntly: Why should their scattershot charity replace focused public funding?
At a certain level, wealth not only loses its utility, it becomes an obscenity. It proves that the person hoarding such wealth has exploited God knows how many other people—typically the working class, and especially the poor—to become so wealthy that to consider how much richer they are than the average American is like considering the size of the universe in comparison to the size of Earth.
That’s why I say “being a billionaire is unethical”: No one can exploit that many people for that long a stretch of time and not come out the other side of that particular shit tunnel smelling like a rose. To flaunt that wealth by hoarding it, doling it out in small fractions, and continuing to passively build it by doing nothing is fucking disgusting and the fact that you care more about “doing right by the rich” shows how much you value the approval of people who’d sooner step on your neck, choke you to death, and still make you pay them for the privilege of having been killed by your “betters”.
I don’t believe the government should own or control the means of production. But I do believe they should tax the everloving fuck out of the wealthy people who do.
No, it isn’t.
Let’s assume that you get your plan and that instead of taxing the poor, you waive all their taxes and start taxing people who make…let’s say, $50,000 a year. Right off the bat you’re being unfair because you’re giving people beneath a specific income bracket an “out” from having to be taxed—a fact about which I’m sure those who are barely on the other side of that bracket would complain. But that’s not worth exploring right now.
Now assume that the flat tax is 10% of all income, regardless of how much anyone makes (aside from the people beneath the tax line). That means someone making $50,000 gives up $5,000 every year; for someone making $50,000, $5,000 is a significant amount of money. As the income level goes up, the amount does as well—but the utility of that taxed amount lowers. Someone who makes $500,000 a year, for example, will feel the loss of $50,000 a year, but they can still live with few worries about paying the bills. Someone who makes $5 million might miss their $500k in taxes, but they’re not going to be sweating it that much, considering they can still live well on $4.5 million. Someone who makes $50 million a year would lose $5 million, and I can all but guarantee that unless they’re spending their money on hookers and blow all day every day, they’re not going to care all that much about losing that much in taxes.
At some point, the law of diminishing utility kicks in and people who get taxed a small amount of their income won’t miss it because they’ve got so much of their income left that they can still live well. The poor don’t get to experience that feeling because while they may pay the same percentage that the rich do, they’re paying more money than they can typically afford to give up because they need that money in a far more utilitarian way.
You’re so concerned with “fairness” in terms of percentages that you look past how much people who can’t hoard wealth need the money you think they should pay so rich people don’t have to pay nearly as much out of “fairness” to the rich. That’s the fatal flaw of the flat tax idea, and it’s a flaw you’ve refused to consider in its entirety by the way you keep cherrypicking things I’ve said and quoted them out of their full context to keep saying shit that ignores the humanities of the situation and holy shit you really are a Republican.
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
What I am suggesting is that you’re so focused on the economics of a flat tax proposal that you’re not even bothering to look at the humanities. You’re not even trying to care that a flat tax would fuck over the poor and those close to the poverty line.
To paraphrase something I heard elsewhere (because I can’t be fucked to find the original right now): The average person is never as close to being rich as they are to being homeless. And to add onto that: Poverty and wealth both compound. But whereas wealth compounds into more wealth (the rich get richer), poverty compounds into even more poverty (the poor get poorer). A rich person who gets into a fender-bender can likely afford to pay for repairs and be back on the road the next day, if not sooner—and without suffering any major setbacks in their life. A poor person who gets into a fender-bender might not seek repairs because they need their car to get to work and public transportation in their area is virtually non-existent. The damage to the car comes back to bite that poor person in a couple of months when the car breaks down on their way to work; now they not only need to pay for the towing of their car, but they need to pay for either repairs or a new car, and that’s not even getting into whether they might miss time at work (thus driving their finances even further into a death spiral).
Taxing the poor person would only make things worse. The same goes for people who are living close to the poverty line. Under a flat tax program—deductibles be damned—they’d have to pay more into the public treasury than they should have to because “it’s fair”. Meanwhile, the rich person gets taxed the same amount and might not even notice because they don’t need that money in the same way a poor person does. Hell, tax a billionaire at a 10% rate, and chances are good that they’ll have made that amount back by the end of the year.
A flat tax punishes the poor and rewards the wealthy. It compounds poverty and wealth in (un)equal measure. The only reason you don’t seem to care is that you’re still so focused on the money—the property, if you will—that you’re looking past the humanity. But hey, that’s no surprise: Conservatives tend to look past the poor on the way to kissing wealthy ass.
The average American isn’t worth $100 million. And if a billionaire can’t live on $100 million dollars per year, that says more about their ridiculous behavior, their ego, and their incompetence with money than it does about anything else. Hell, give me $100 million and I could live comfortably for the rest of my life—with at least three-fourths of that amount still in my bank account by the time I kick the bucket.
I didn’t say they’d pay “more money” full stop; I said they’d pay “more of the money they need to survive”. A poor person might pay a few hundred bucks in taxes, but they might need that money down the line to pay a medical bill or a surprise car repair or some other unforeseen expense that could require more money than they have in the bank. A billionaire who pays $100 million in taxes will not need that money to live comfortably because they already have been and likely always will be.
The law of diminishing utility is a thing: As people make more money, the amount of comfort made possible by that money rises, until they reach a point where no amount of money can make them more comfortable than they already are. At that point, money becomes meaningless in all ways but as a status symbol. Billionaires do not need to be worth a billion dollars or more to live in comfort; at that point, money is but a symbol of their greed and their lust for power—a signifier that they’ve exploited the working class and the government alike to become arguably more powerful than the working class and the government combined.
Poverty isn’t a moral failing—obscene wealth is. That you think the right thing to do is tax the obscenely wealthy at the same rate you’d tax someone scraping by on the $8 an hour they earn in a warehouse owned by an obscenely wealthy asshole is…well, it’s telling everyone a lot about your priorities.
Are you sure you’re not a Republican?
On the post: Facebook Is Banning Anyone Charged With Participating In Capitol Hill Insurrection
Well, they still give Mark Zuckerberg a platform, so…
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
Then how is it a “flat tax” if everyone doesn’t have to pay it? Either everyone pays 10% or it’s going to be skewed—“unfair”, even—in one way or another.
And even assuming the bottom level on income doesn’t get taxed, what happens to people living just above the poverty line, who just barely qualify for the first level that does get taxed? What makes taking away 10% of their income “fair” even though, like the people in the income bracket beneath them, they may need a good chunk of that 10% for some emergency that they can’t foresee?
A progressive tax system makes more sense because we can afford to tax the rich at higher rates. They can afford to lose that much wealth and still have no worries about whether they’ll be able to buy a new car or go to the hospital without being bankrupted or pay for shelter for themselves and their families. Poor people have to make every last cent count, even if it means they go without something important for a few days—like, say, clean water or power or even food. Taxing the poor, even if they live right above the poverty line, places on them a burden that the rich can easily shoulder on their own.
Being a billionaire is immoral and unethical. (It should also be illegal, but that’s just me talking.) Taxing the poor is also immoral and unethical. Why should the government make people who are barely living above the poverty line pay more of the money they need to survive into the public treasury than rich people? Why should the poor and nearly-poor pay 10% of their income and continue to live in poverty while the rich pay the same percentage and continue to live in luxury they’ll never really have to worry about losing?
On the post: Facebook Is Banning Anyone Charged With Participating In Capitol Hill Insurrection
I’m well aware of the many ethical failures of Facebook. My ethical concerns here directly and specifically relate to moderation efforts; having been a moderator in the past, thinking about doing what Facebook did gives me pause to consider my own ethics in that regard.
Legally, it’s fine. Morally, it’s great. Ethically, it’s questionable at best. And on any given day, I might be for or against what Facebook did. That I don’t see an easy answer to the ethical question right now is…discomforting.
On the post: Facebook Is Banning Anyone Charged With Participating In Capitol Hill Insurrection
Hey, if the white hood fits…
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
There still lies a significant question you need to answer vis-á-vis your flat tax proposal: Why should a poor person give up 10% of their income when they need that money in a far more acute, direct, “I need this to live in case of an emergency” way than a rich person will ever need 10% of their income? The poor can’t afford to pay into the public treasury in the same way as the rich—so why should they be punished for their poverty by having to give up more of the money they absolutely need to live? Aside from the purely mathematical fairness of “everyone pays the same rate”, what specific facet of a flat tax plan is fair to the poorest Americans?
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